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Link: http://www.mantisbt.org/

Enterprise Architect is very nice, since you can do forward and reverse software engineering with it.

However, if you do not have the budget allocated for it, a good compromise is StarUML,
which became very nice and usable lately and has the same "feeling" and menu-driven approach
like the old Rational Rose and Enterprise Architect:

http://staruml.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/staruml/files/staruml/5.0/staruml-5.0-with-cm.exe/download

As for Rational Rose, the first original version was very good with some known quirks until it
became IBM Rational Rose and was converted into a "super Eclipse" plug-in.

So, if you enjoyed drawing UML diagrams in the old Rational Rose,
then Enterprise Architect and StarUML are the tools that you are looking for.

And if you do not like to draw with a mouse then Graphviz Dot and a good text editor is for you:
http://www.graphviz.org/Download.php

For tracking issues / documents and schedule,
I can recommend either BugZilla, Mantis or BaseCamp:

http://www.bugzilla.org/download/

http://www.mantisbt.org/

http://basecamphq.com/

As for the actual writing part, your company should already have a good set of Word Templates,
to document the actual Sofware Requirement and Specification (SRS), Sofware Design Document (SDD),
Change Request Document (CRD).

Once, you got those set up, then we mostly use MantisBT or BaseCamp to share, comment and track them.

As for producing code documentation, the choice are: Doxygen, JavaDoc, NDoc, JsDoc:

http://www.doxygen.org/

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/index-jsp-135444.html

http://ndoc.sourceforge.net/

We are a pretty small shop, so for us Mantis seems to work pretty well. We have set up hooks bewteen it and our SVN version-control. There is a wiki feature that has some quirks, although I don't have the latest Mantis version which is supposed to improve the wiki integration.

Assuming you're all in the same office...

One-on-one meetings in a comfortable and somewhat informal manner. Make it regular (twice a week or so?) and find some way to give them advanced notice indirectly, like doing it at the same time every week or passing by their office/cubes a few minutes before jumping in to ask for the informal report. If you startle them, leave and come back in a few minutes (really!). Their desks should be oriented in a manner that makes it hard to sneak up on them; if that's not the case, buy a mirror for their monitor.

Group meetings at a less often interval (weekly or every other week) where everybody talks about what they're doing, and you reveal the long-term strategies, etc. Doing this over a free lunch or end-of-day beers (5:30p is "beer thirty" on "frosty friday" or "thirsty thursday," etc.) is always a winner. You already know most of the answers, so this is actually all for their benefit; this is when you report to them and they report to each other. This helps emphasize the philosophy that when co-workers are all friends, more work gets done with less apparent effort.

Never criticize them for something you also fail at. Instead, announce that you're looking to improve that aspect in yourself and they'll get the message.

You read Slashdot, so you're probably very IT-savvy ... older software engineers are a bit removed from that, so be careful about introducing new services (e.g. software services for bug tracking, wiki, source control, project management, social networking). When you do such introductions, make sure they are walked through, and the installation process is trivialized (all the above examples are web-based to eliminate client-side installation).

Finally, pick up a book on agile development practice and consider migrating the team to a scrum cycle. Even if you decide it's not the right idea (or if you're already doing it), it will give you some management insight.

We ran MantisBT on a Windows 2003 server at my previous job. Added 30 or so extra lines to the config file which took the user's NT logon (automatically authenticated with WIA in IIS), looked them up in the user table, if they weren't present, did an LDAP call to find out who they are and add them to the database automatically, and finally set up the session to make them logged in. It made it seamless (though new users would have to visit the site once to get their account created in order to be added to any projects).

I have used Mantis in my former job for that kind of stuff. As far as I remember it does all you want.

Its pretty much how I would have designed a CRM - lightweight and very simple to use - generally a pleasure to use. Open-source php and an option of database vendors (mysql mssql etc). I'm no php coder but I still integrate some reporting and make some minor tweeks - it doesn't make enough sense to me for major changes though. http://www.mantisbt.org/ My only BIG want is for out-of-the-box integration with source control.

One word: Mantis. (be sure to look at the demo)

The tools are not only useful for external communities of users. In a previous job, several years ago now, I had to look after the development of a fairly complex site. This comprised a public facing side, but also a number of back-end tools. As we developed the site, and post launch we needed a bug tracker so that members of staff could report problems as we found them. The Bugzilla interface was just too inflexible and overly complex for our users to cope with. We ended up using Mantis instead. And were very happy with it.

Our group evaluated a handful of workgroup tools: issue tracking, revision control, documentation. Trac was in the list, but it fell short on a number of points after we tried it for a simple project. We wanted SVN integration and liked Mantis, so we hooked in scmbug. It took a little tweaking to setup the 'products' in scmbug to meet our Mantis usage pattern, but it does the trick. Throw on your favorite wiki (mediawiki, twiki, moinmoin, etc.), and you are covered.

The company I work for, as a sysadmin, has put Mantis in place in order to keep track of just about everything, from bug fixes to feature request to system, network and software management. It works very well, and allows the system group to be on top of users requests. Highly recommended.

http://www.mantisbt.org/

We use this and it works pretty well.

Cheers,

Colin

Another bug tracking tool to consider is Mantis. We use it in our product to track a large number of small issues that the client is constantly coming up with; we think it works well.

However, it's quite possible that it's also too complicated for your needs. I like the suggestion of a simple email address as a public interface; perhaps just install Mediawiki for yourself so you can store everything in it? I like wikis for keeping track of simple stuff.

I Agree with the parent. Mantisbt is one of the best out there. Very easy to configure (at least when I used it last about 18 months ago). It is also quite easy to customise and reprogram. This is what I did. I did a major edit of the ssource code and the database in order to customise it for our own internal mini-helpdesk. It worked brilliant (I think it was version 17 or 18). The reporting is also fantastic. The reason why I had to customise it was because it was geared towards "bug reporting" but I wanted to make it into a "problem/ticket" reporting system.

Anyway, you can find it here: http://www.mantisbt.org/

Once you get it set up, Mantis is pretty easy to use. You can have a simply interface for creating tickets, with more information available to those who work, verify, and close the tickets.

Hi, I suggest that you try out Mantis. The company I work at used to use Bugzilla before but the interface was overly complicated and fugly to look at and nobody really ended up using it. Right now we use Mantis at work and its quite a change from bugzilla. Very decent interface. It has an advaned and a simple mode as well. http://www.mantisbt.org/

I started a new job this summer. First shock was to discover that bug tracking was handled with assorted spreadsheets all subtly different and a sprinkle of randomly formatted mail. Just reporting bugs and worse, gathering information about them was driving everyone crazy. I promptly took the initiative to write requirements and implement them by installing and parametering Mantis. With barely a hint of evangelism it took on like bush fire. Userbase is now sixty users and growing. Bug tracking is back to sanity and everyone is happy including my boss. This is my second such deployement and it worked like a charm both times. If all the projects were that easy...

Subversion or CVS as version control is about the same when it comes to a small project. Subversion is the successor to CVS and should normally be the choice unless there are other factors that makes it hard to implement.

Obviously - the boss in question is probably also rejecting ISO 9000. And I even wonder about what the accounting looks like. So it may be a good idea to silently look for another job and change before the shit hits the fan.

I'm personally considering the following rules when coding:

• No compiler warnings - unless there are very strong reasons for leaving one alone.
• Any kind of simple version control. (cvs, svn, cms, rcs or whatever is convenient/available)
• Some kind of bug tracker - like Mantis. Excel isn't really good enough.
• Check C code with Splint.
• Write well-structured code - not necessarily with a lot of comments - but the code shall be easy to read.
• If self-healing can be handled in the code - use it. (like checking if a file was closed when the finalize() method is called in Java and then close the file if it wasn't)
• If possible - run the code through Purify or a similar tool.
• ALWAYS braces (or what the language used dictates) around the body of an IF-statement.
• Each method/function shall have a comment describing that comment. (OK, I'm not always doing this)
• Try to keep variables fairly short - too long variable names cuts down on the readability.
• Use of single letter variables are permitted - using the old-fashioned variables i, j and k as index variables in loops.
• Indent code properly - using SPACES to get compatibility with most editors. Eclipse is fairly good at this.
• Align the braces so that an opening brace is in the same column as a closing brace - this makes the code a lot easier to read than if an opening brace is over the right edge somewhere.
• Keep opening/closing braces on their own line. - Yet another readability issue.

Subversion for source control. (The Eclipse development platform has plugins for PHP and Subversion.)

There are tons of good bug trackers out there. I like Mantis.

PHP-based applications can be great if designed by good programmers.

For proof, just look at some of the projects using PHP: Mantis Bug Tracker, PHPMyAdmin, MediaWiki (Wikipedia), several top discussion boards, Friendster, reportedly apps by Yahoo, and countless others.

These are HIGH-QUALITY web applications. Of course, great things can be done with other platforms, but it's nonsense to slam PHP because "it's so easy that non-programmers produce a lot of crap code with it". The proof that it's worthy is in the *best* apps that are produced, not the worst ones!

Mantis Bugtracker ( http://www.mantisbt.org/ ) handles this as follows:

1. A user reports a bug.
2. The developer identifies that the bug applied to other branches.
3. The developer clones the bug, which automatically creates a copy of the bug and allows the developer to edit it before it gets submitted. The user edits the version to which the issue applies.
4. The created clone automatically gets a child relationship with the original bug, but this can be changed as part of the editing done in step 3.
5. By doing the above process it is easy to keep track of the branches that the bug applies to, in which ones it was fixed, the modifications done in the code (if your soure control tool is integrated), and the bug summary appears also in the auto-generated change log of these branches.

The above achieves the power of tracking the issue on each branch with minimal overheads on the developer.

have you tried mantis? yes, i'm plugging it. but i like it a lot. it has an excellent interface out of the box. it is also very snappy and responsive.

a lot of the bugzillas I use (redhat, gnu) are very creaky and slow -- dunno if that's due to bugzilla or just huge databases on underpowered hardware though. but the bugzilla interface on top of that just makes me go blah.

i agree. bugzilla is ugly and dated. it is functional, but in that kind of way that 3270 terminals hooked up to an ancient 1970s mainframe is "functional" :-)

sounds like you might want to look at mantis.

i agree with you. bugzilla is functional, but it is ugly as sin. it kinda screams "this application was made for ncsa mosaic".

sounds like you should try mantis.

bugzilla is rather top heavy, and the interface is pretty cumbersome (and ugly as sin). i don't know if the servers are underpowered or if the database is just too large, but redhat and gnu's bugzillas are very creaky and slow.

bugzilla does work, it's relatively stable, but it's very bleah-inducing. sort of like the bugtracker of choice for curmudgeons :-)

for almost all projects i prefer mantis. it's much lighter and the interface is much more straightforward.

I was in the same situation you are once. Then I found Mantis! It's basically everything you would think to code yourself, except it's already done! Very nicely documented (and customizable) php code & mysql code as well.

At work we've been using Mantis (awesome tool) for bug-tracking but we're about to start using NetOffice for Project and Task management, it has a nice bottom up approach (different from something like MS Project) and it's a breeze to set up.

It's worth checking out.

Your best option depends on the resources you have available. If you have a PHP/MySQL capable web server Mantis can be a lifesaver. Simpler to set up than Buzilla, more structured than a Wiki. I don't recommend the 1.XX releases yet, get the latest of the downlevel (0.19.2 as I write this). Although there will be some nice features in the next release, it is still in Alpha.

If it probably a hair more than a single person needs, but it allows all of the things you described to be done. The other idea (using a wiki) also requires PHP (or some scripting language) and a database anyway: if you are going there, go for a complete solution. On the other hand, we also use a wiki for static documentation purposes. Nothing beats a wiki for hammering out "how to" and "FAQ" type documents.

If you can't do a web based solution, I suggest simply following the recommendations of another here: use your mail client's "todo" system. It won't be shared (unless you have Outlook+Exchange, in which case, share your todo list) but it keeps things nicely organized: better than post-it notes.

Very simple to deploy, simple enough so that even non-technical users feel confortable, somewhat customizable... I've deployed it twice and all users have always loved it :
http://www.mantisbt.org/

Purely because I feel the UI is complicated. Of course I've mainly dealt with it on hideously large and complex projects like KDE and Mozilla, so the complexity of the UI may simply be a function of the project's complexity (or, more specifically, a function of Mozilla's complexity, as it was originally designed for Mozilla).

Note that I'm not meaning to slag off Bugzilla at all - it does the job and does it well, as far as I understand. But I wouldn't want to use it for the kind of software I work on (much much smaller and simpler than Moz).

My team is using a combination of Trac and Mantis at the moment - my boss likes Mantis better as a pure bugtracker, but I'm hoping to convert him after Trac 0.9. :)

Mantis is planning support for MS-SQL and PostgreSQL in the upcoming 1.0 release. It already works well with MySQL, but if you're going to be choosy, Mantis is a very strong contender for the future and will definitely be competitive with Bugzilla.

any closed list (or even just anybody sending a message to me personally) just increases the risk of the thing getting lost and delayed for the wrong reasons.'"

I think he really hit the nail on the head with that comment. I can't tell you the number of times CRs or issues have been sent to me through e-mail which have either been lost or forgotten about on my part (sorry). However, using tracking programs which the entire group has access to (we use Mantis) not only are the problems kept on fresh but people will remind me of them or if they are feeling particularly bold, fix them themselves.

I totally agree. A simple example: I wanted to test drive Mantis recently. What I did was download PHP Triad on my laptop, deploy Mantis and try. I know that if we end up using it, it will end up on a Solaris or Linux box but it would have been completely unrealistic for me to do the trial on one of those machines. I would have given it a miss if I had been limited to a *NIX platform. The same goes for FireFox and OpenOffice. If those applications where only available for *NIX, we would not use them because we just can't have everybody on Linux.

I've done exactly this... I have Mantis, dotProject, SugarCRM, and a few other things running internally that no one even wonders where they are.

And all the while, they're running on a little box under my desk.

And Mantis will run on an IIS box once you put php on it and have a mysql database somewhere.

I am in a similar situation, mostly Windows with a couple of HP-UX machines that I don't have real access to. I ended up installing Mantis Bug Tracker, http://www.mantisbt.org/. It's written in PHP and install time and complexity is low.

I've used Mantis with great success for several years, both on Linux and Windows hosts. They also have limited support for SQL Server, which is somewhat unofficial with the current v0.19 release but official release will come with v1 next year. Enjoy!

Damien

Mabye use a groupware client (like phpgroupware).

Or better yet, use Mantis. Its a great web-based bug tracker. But we use it at work to track all kinds of things. All you're really looking for is something to manage bugs, enhancements, etc. Install it, CVS, and ViewCVS, and you should have almost everything you need.